Half myself mocks the other half.

To be pathetic when we cry, we must cry without wanting to and without knowing it.

'Leave behind endless hope and vast thoughts', says the poet. I no longer have vast thoughts.

Strength is not energy. Some writers have more muscles than talent.

Thoughts still in seed; they must be left to develop. If we touch them, they will be spoiled.

If, when a stone falls, God helps it to fall.

To descend into ourselves, we must first lift ourselves up.

My ideas! It is the house for lodging them that costs me so much to build.

Those thoughts that come to us suddenly and that are not yet ours.

When you write easily, you always think you have more talent than you really do.

The time I lost in pleasure I now lose in suffering.

I wanted to bypass words, I disdained them: words have had their revenge – through difficulty, etc.

These thoughts form not only the foundation of my work, but of my life.

To know how not to write – to be capable of not writing.

… this poetry of thought.

What we write with difficulty is written with more care, engraves itself more deeply.

We still know how to mark the hours, but no longer how to ring them. The carillon of our clocks is missing.

Thoughts that cannot survive the test of the open air and that evaporate as soon as we take them out of our room. To put them to the test of isolation. Take them out of the book where you found them: they do not endure.

Where do ideas go? – They go into the memory of God.

I would like thoughts to follow one another in a book like stars in the sky, with order, with harmony, but effortlessly and at intervals, without touching, without mingling; and nevertheless not without finding their place, harmonising, arranging themselves. Yes, I would like them to move without interfering with one another, in such a way that each could survive independently. No overstrict cohesion; but no coherence either; the lightest is monstrous.

Those who sing well have an echo in their throat …

Plato is the Rabelais of abstractions.

Heaven will abolish the language in which these works are written.

The skies of skies, the sky of the sky.

God is the place where I do not remember the rest.

Take us back to the time when wine was invented …

Forbidden to speak of God …

Children always want to look behind mirrors.

Through memory we travel against time, through forgetfulness we follow its course.

A work of genius, whether poetic or didactic, is too long if it cannot be read in one day.

Thought forms in the soul in the same way clouds form in the air.

A thought is as real as a cannonball.

from The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, ed. and trans. Paul Auster